In Girl, Interrupted Susanna Kaysen challenges the readers to question the

conventional ideas of the mentally ill.

In this provocative true story, Kaysen tells of her experience as an eighteen-year-old patient in a
psychiatric hospital in the late 1960s. Four months after running away from her Princeton, NJ, home,
Kaysen committed herself to McLean Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in an affluent suburb of Boston
where many famous poets and musicians have been treated. There she was diagnosed as having a
borderline personality, which is, as she describes as an adult, "a way station between neurosis and
psychosis: a fractured but not disassembled psyche." The doctor who referred Kaysen to McLean
described her as profoundly depressed and leading an increasingly patternless life. Recent activities in
her life had included: a relationship with her high school English teacher; attempted suicide; running away
from her parent's home to live in a boarding house in Cambridge, MA; and taking up with a boyfriend she
describes as troublesome.

The doctor, who Kaysen met only once, told her she would be at McLean for a few weeks, but she spent
close to two years there. During that time she developed close friendships with several of the other
teenaged patients who had a wide range of problems including drug addiction, eating disorders, and a
history of sexual abuse. The friendships they formed resemble the close ties that many teenage girls have
with each other. You could forget for a few minutes that they were not in the dorm room of a prep school
or college as they leisurely passed the time watching television and talking about boyfriends. But these
girls were in a very different place with a complete lack of privacy. They were not allowed to leave the
ward, open a window, or even shave their legs without supervision. It became apparent throughout the
book, though, that many patients in the ward did not want to leave the safety of the hospital.

There are incidents in Girl, Interrupted that seem to leap out at the reader that are then gone without
explanation. These incidences lend to the book's elusive nature and force the reader to deliberate over
why some of us wind up in places like McLean. For example, James Watson, winner of 1962 Nobel Prize
in Medicine, visits Kaysen at McLean. It isn't clear how he knows her. He is certainly more than twenty
years older than she, so perhaps he is a friend of her parents. During his visit, Watson offers to get her
out of the hospital and move her over to England with him where he will help her get a job as a
governess. After giving it very little thought at all, Kaysen decides to stay at McLean saying, "I'm here now
Jim. I think I've got to stay here." She is more interested in him sharing the "secrets of life" for which he
won a Nobel Prize than she is in leaving McLean where, despite its problems, she is safe.

Although the subject of the book is intense, Kaysen's sincerity and humor soften the tragedy of the
situation. At other times, however, this same sincerity and humor seem to amplify the heartbreaking
situation of Kaysen's interrupted girlhood. Her deep intelligent reflections of her experiences at McLean
and the way they so dramatically differ from what her records indicate make the book difficult to put down.